By Coraline Seksinsky

“Surprisingly I never considered working in a library before. Libraries were not a big part of my childhood. I was very much a Barnes and Nobles kid.” says Cass Lauer, describing her relationship to libraries before she started working in them. Currently she is the Marketing and Engagement Coordinator at the Kinnelon Public Library in Kinnelon New Jersey. Her career amongst the stacks helped to rekindle a lifelong passion for story, leading to the publication last November of her Debut novel, issued on New Degree Press, Vox Libri. 

Growing up Lauer was a voracious reader, though more so an avid story-listener. “I liked listening to other people tell stories. So where I liked reading, I did just like storytelling as a whole.” She doesn’t describe her family as particularly bookish, aside from her mom. By the time she was 13, she knew clearly that studying English was what she wanted to do. As an undergraduate at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison she studied creative writing and taught dance on the side. After she ended their studies at Fairleigh Dickinson, she was still teaching dance. As burnout began setting in, she decided to pursue the passion which had brought her to study creative writing in college. 

Soon after finding work as a freelance writer she saw an ad for a hybrid publisher called New Degree Publisher, now called Manuscripts. As a Developmental Editor Lauer helped coach dozens and dozens of prospective authors through the manuscript process in four month ‘cohorts’ of around 10 to 15 authors at a time. “They would submit pages to me and I’d critique them and tell them ways to improve them… The point of the program was that at the end of the four months with me, they would have a finished first draft of a manuscript that was ready to go into publishing and developed further.” She continues, “the majority of them were nonfiction,” Lauer says. “Teaching them how to write a book I found quite similar to teaching dance in so far as trying to identify what the student, in this case the writer, needs from me the instructor.” 

After teaching others to write books Lauer wondered why she couldn’t do the same thing with her own project. Vox Libri began life as her senior year project at Fairleigh Dickinson, where students were required to complete a novel or novella. As an employee at New Degree she could be paired with one of her coworkers to run through the process she coached so many other authors through before. The book is a phantasmagorical fantasy centered around a mysterious book that takes over the life of the heroine, Etta, who has just started a new life in Northampton Massachusetts. The setting was inspired by Lauer’s love of the Five Colleges region of the state after having attended a writing workshop at UMass: Amherst. 

The last year has been about getting the book done, needing it to be done. “I am currently on a small break, but I’m feeling that itch to start again. I’ve already got book two plotted out and outlined. So now it’s just a matter of now finding the time and getting back into that practice.” In regards to the future there are few sure bets. But one I would make with confidence is that no matter where Cass Lauer ends up, her life will be full of books.